In the container-making industry, containers are typically manufactured in at least two parts: a container body and at least one container end. The container body may be drawn and ironed such that only a single container end is required (two-piece container), or the container body may be formed by rolling a stamped sheet into cylindrical form and welding the seam such that two container ends are required (three-piece container). Regardless of the particular container structure, container manufacturers typically separately supply large quantities of container bodies and container ends to customers who introduce substances into the container bodies and subsequently attach the container end(s) to the container body. In this regard, a predetermined number or "stick" of container ends are typically packaged by the manufacturer in face-to-face relation in cylindrical bags having a diameter slightly greater than the container ends for shipment to the customer.
The bagging operation typically entails the separation of a bag from a stack of bags and the subsequent presentation of the bag to a bag loading station. The separation and presentation steps can be done manually or, to improve the efficiency of the process, automatically with a bag separating device. Generally representative of automatic bag separating devices are U.S. Pat. No. 4,537,010 to Mojden et al., issued Aug. 27, 1985; U.S. Pat. No. 4,442,652 to Wakamatsu et al., issued Apr. 17, 1984; U.S. Pat. No. 4,395,864 to Anderson et al., issued Aug. 2, 1983; U.S. Pat. No. 3,962,845 to Mojden et al., issued Jun. 15, 1976; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,878,945 to Mojden et al., issued Apr. 22, 1975.
Although the above-referenced types of devices can be employed to automate a bag separating process, many of these devices tend to be space-consuming, slow to operate at production capacities, and/or unnecessarily complex due to the large numbers of moving parts. Of particular importance, some of the above-referenced devices have a tendency to undesirably remove more than one bag at a time. Consequently, it is an object of the present invention to provide a compact, low-cost, efficient automatic bag separating device for consistently removing a single bag from a stack of bags.